[H-GEN] Linux is still too hard, even for experts

[Greg Black]

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It's rare for me to attempt something entirely new in the Unix
world, so I thought it might be of interest to record some of
the events of the past week.

I wanted to install an OS on a new box; I had already downloaded
the ISO's I needed onto my laptop at Humbug and I had obtained
some advice on burning CD's at the same meeting.  Armed with
that, I expected to take up to half an hour to burn my first
ever four ISO's onto CD's, using the same laptop running its
Debian unstable distribution.

I read all the documentation that had been recommended (and this
took quite a bit more than the half hour I had budgeted for the
whole job); then I set about following the instructions.  No
joy.  I wasted most of the "free" hours of four days and got
absolutely nowhere and had no idea what to do next.  Then I
decided to stop wasting my time and to find an alternative way
of accomplishing my goals.

The options seemed to be to use Windows on the same laptop to
burn the CD's or to use FreeBSD on the target machine to do it.
I'd never done it under Windows and had no real desire to get
tangled in that swamp.  So I installed an OS on the new box
using some CD's I had at hand.  I booted the OS.  I typed the
obvious commands to NFS mount the ISO's and to burn the CD's.
The entire process, including the initial OS install and setup,
accessing the ISO's on the LAN, burning the ISO's, rebooting
from the new CD's, and installing the intended OS from the newly
burnt CD's, took about 40 minutes.  That felt about right.

I don't know why the Linux experience was so painful and, in the
end, unsuccessful; and I'm sure somebody else would have been
able to accomplish what I was trying to do.  But I was certainly
disappointed to discover that a task like this, which did not
strike me as very difficult, would turn out to be so far beyond
me.  Had I been somebody with less experience, I might have been
inclined to blame myself for not being able to figure it out.
But, even though I was still a complete newbie when I went to do
it under another OS, I found it easy -- so I think the problem
in this case is a Linux one.  Certainly, the error messages I
was trying to decode in my attempts to get something to work
were no help.

This is not intended as a rant against Linux; nor is it intended
to suggest that FreeBSD is better than Linux[1].  It's just a
story to show that some of the problems that people have, and
which they come to Humbug to get help with, are indeed not
always easy to solve, even for very experienced Unix people.  We
still have a very long way to go indeed before general purpose
computers can hope to become generally useful tools.

Cheers, Greg

[1] For those who have forgotten, Linux is "better" than FreeBSD
    on my laptop, because FreeBSD's support for my PC-Card stuff
    is currently completely broken (and has been broken in all
    releases after 4.3).  However, I might just re-install a
    small FreeBSD partition on the laptop so that I can use the
    CD-writer when I want to.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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